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Archives for January 2017

In my young and single days, luxurious vacations meant hitchhiking, train hopping, couchsurfing, sleeping in ditches or working as a Mexican farm laborer in exchange for beans and rice. Surprisingly, my wife and son have a different, more commonly held definition of luxury. Luckily, there is a way for us to continue traveling in true luxury but on the same hobo budget.

The actual flier I made for my wife to get her pumped up for our last free vacation.

My businesses are usually built around challenging conventional wisdom, so I tend to gain by taking the other side. It’s been very profitable and entertaining for me — Mark Cuban

Washington DC: Rapidly appreciating homes, poorly performing schools.

The conventional wisdom is that it is always a better investment to buy a home in a good school district. Just like with much other conventional wisdom, this commonly held belief is often wrong. Good schools may have been the number one factor in real estate appreciation at some point in the past, but I don’t believe that is true today. However, after decades of being told specific trends are true, people stop looking at the data and fail to notice the changes that have taken place.

From an investment perspective, choosing a home because it is in the best school district often turns out to be the wrong choice. I am not going to argue that you should never buy near good schools, or always buy in bad school districts, but in many cases, the conventional wisdom on this topic is out of date, incomplete, or just wrong.

Analyzing a Denver area home appreciation map from the past 20 years, I noticed that the greatest appreciation seemed to occur in what were considered the worst school districts, while the areas with the best schools had sub-par appreciation. When I started analyzing data from around the country, I found this trend to be common in many other areas as well.